The war was backed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party, who insisted the war was needed to “disrupt” ISIS across the region, saying ISIS is promoting terror attacks in Canada.

The vote was opposed by both the Liberal Party and the New Democrats, who pointed out that the war is being escalated with no planned endgame, and no obvious objective.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair accused the ruling Conservatives of “sleepwalking Canada into this war,” and of acting outside of international law in setting up the indefinite conflict.

Canada initially deployed 69 special forces troops to Iraq as their contribution to the US-led war, and those troops repeatedly ended up on the front lines, always putatively by accident, fighting ISIS.

Officials said the attacks on Syria would begin soon, but that the exact timing would depend on when the US gave them a list of assigned targets to attack.

Author: Jason Ditz

It's almost entertaining to watch the Canadian "intelligentsia" scratching their heads trying to figure out why Herr Harper is constantly licking Uncle Sam's boots. Apparently they never heard about the pipeline that Harper's handlers want Obama to approve.

jjc

Everything the Harper regime does is based on an explicitly political calculation.

curmudgeonvt

And I actually thought the Canadians were the sane group in this hemisphere…

Stu

As a Canadian, I'm sad to say the Canadian public will probably support him more for this. Few Canadians give a rat's arse about foreign policy, even less so than people in the U.S., other than in that they are becoming increasingly reflexive in their militarism. Harper's govt. has had a lot to do with this and has put a lot more money into military propaganda of all sorts. Canada is worse on Israel than the U.S. is as well, and Harper wants Canada to have its fingers in all sorts of conflicts around the world. His poll ratings were very low prior to the "terrorist attacks" in Quebec and Ottawa and he's been playing the anti-muslim terrorism card ever since. Not surprisingly–because a border doesn't magically make a nation of people inherently more intelligent than another)–his poll ratings have soared (as they would have south of the border) and are now significantly higher than the opposition. He's in the middle of ramming through a secret police bill that will effectively make Canada a police state, giving CSIS (Canada's CIA) powers to arrest anyone they deem suspicious. Canada's broken election system also virtually guarantees he'll win the next election as well, since he managed to get a majority govt last time despite only grabbing something like 38 percent of the vote. So yeah, other than that things are good up north.